This is just one more case of Trump lying to downplay how dangerous the Coronavirus really is. I admit I was stupid enough to take him at his word when talked of the number of flu deaths per year
In late February, when the stock market was beginning to fall over coronavirus fears, President Donald Trump held a briefing at the White House to reassure people that there was little chance of the virus causing significant disruption in the United States.
“I want you to understand something that shocked me when I saw it,” he said. “The flu, in our country, kills from 25,000 people to 69,000 people a year. That was shocking to me.”
His point was to suggest that the coronavirus was no worse than the flu, whose toll of deaths most of us apparently barely noticed.
However the statistics he used for Flu are inflated estimates from the CDC and not actual confirmed deaths from the flu.
The 25,000 to 69,000 numbers that Trump cited do not represent counted flu deaths per year; they are estimates that the CDC produces by multiplying the number of flu death counts reported by various coefficients produced through complicated algorithms. These coefficients are based on assumptions of how many cases, hospitalizations, and deaths they believe went unreported. In the last six flu seasons, the CDC’s reported number of actual confirmed flu deaths—that is, counting flu deaths the way we are currently counting deaths from the coronavirus—has ranged from 3,448 to 15,620, which far lower than the numbers commonly repeated by public officials and even public health experts.
So the result is the coronavirus is actually 9.5 and 44 times more deadly than the seasonal flu. I know that many have speculated about the number of actual coronavirus deaths. But this article really put it all in perspective for me. I really don’t understand why the medical experts have not corrected this and in doing so helped downplay how deadly the Coronavirus is versus the seasonal flu.
To do this, we have to compare counted deaths to counted deaths, not counted deaths to wildly inflated statistical estimates. If we compare, for instance, the number of people who died in the United States from COVID-19 in the second full week of April to the number of people who died from influenza during the worst week of the past seven flu seasons (as reported to the CDC), we find that the novel coronavirus killed between 9.5 and 44 times more people than seasonal flu. In other words, the coronavirus is not anything like the flu: It is much, much worse.
blogs.scientificamerican.com/...